The Weekly Sift

The tariff fiasco continued this week. After swearing that he’d never back down from last week’s tariffs, Trump did indeed back down — and then claimed he’d meant to do that all along.

This week’s featured post focuses on not getting trapped in whatever position is the opposite of Trump’s. In this case, that means being careful in how you oppose Trump’s nonsensical tariff policy. These particular tariffs are crazy, but that shouldn’t push us to critique them from a neo-liberal free-trade stance. Globalization has had its victims, particularly among the non-college White men who make up the core of Trump’s coalition. They’re not wrong to want change.

So tariffs and industrial policy have a role to play in the Democratic worldview. But not this role. It’s a more nuanced and harder-to-communicate position than free trade, but otherwise we’ll get trapped into defending the very flawed pre-Trump status quo.

That post should go out around 10 EST. The weekly summary will cover the approaching clash between Trump and the Supreme Court, some very wrong-headed executive orders concerning the environment, abuse of the Social Security database, and one more thing I may spin off into its own featured post: As we approach the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, anti-Trump and anti-King-George rhetoric is starting to merge.

That should post in the vicinity of noon.